5 things I learned about Social Media from my Digital Mums experience

I admit I am proud of myself for graduating from the Digital Mums Strategic Social Media Manager course. Every day now, I devour blogs, articles, e-books, listen to podcasts and join webinars about social media. And, wow! I understand and enjoy them all!

In the final part of the course, we had to submit a report and part of it was our key learnings from the 6 months of intensive live training. I could write for hours, but I thought I’d share 5 basic tips here.

Know your audience

A given for any marketing discipline, yes. But we were encouraged to dig deeper and formulate really in-depth profiles for each of our target customer personas. Much research and online stalking led to a pretty robust profile, firmly planted in the front of my mind.

Knowing your target audience’s habits, their pleasures, their aspirations, what gets them going and what turns them right off is a must if you want to connect with them on social media. How else can you be pushing out the right content to engage with them?

Be on brand

Again, I know, not a whole new marketing concept. However I came to understand that on social media, a brand has hundreds of opportunities each day to connect with their customers. As a social media manager taking the time to get under the skin of the brand, honing the tone of voice, the values and the humour is essential.

It takes a bit of time to build up the confidence to reflect these in every interaction, but a consistent brand personality in every post and conversation speaks volumes for a confident brand image.

Stick to the strategy

So you know your audience, you know your brand and your objectives and you’ve nailed your social media strategy. Then in week one, disaster! Engagement levels are low, only a handful of new followers, no click-throughs! Panic stations!

Be calm. Don’t toss the strategy paper out the window in floods of tears. Take the time to analyse the data (there’s lots of this available). Rationally figure out what doesn’t seem to be working and why. It’s probably not your strategy. It might not even be your content. What times of day are you posting? Are you using the best hashtags? Have you been promoting your posts to key influencers to share? Is anyone even seeing it?

Once you have some insight from analytics, tweak your content and tactics and try again. And again. Until you find what works for your audience. Once you start seeing success in your metrics, figure out how to make it better.

Be social

This is the bit that took me a while to master. In the words of my course tutor, it felt a bit ‘icky’. But once I built the confidence to start reaching out to followers and influencers, I saw the results almost immediately.

Taking the time each day (yes, I’m afraid it boils down to time) to interact with people on your platforms, liking and commenting, re-tweeting and replying, getting involved in tweetchats. Basically getting involved in their conversations (in a polite way, of course). Above all else I found this the best way to build an engaged community.

Use the tools

Those first few weeks of managing a number of platforms for a brand were like a near-drowning experience. The sheer amount of time spent trawling for relevant content, creating beautiful images, posting, scheduling, interacting and not to mention the analytics and reporting… How would I ever get the time to do this all?

The help is all there, you just need to know where to look and master the mechanics of these excellent online tools.

I can’t and won’t list them all here, there are numerous blogs on the right tools for each area of the job, but I worked with Buffer, Hootsuite, Pocket, Right Relevance, Buzz Sumo, Feedly, Klout, Canva, Pic Monkey and many more besides. Suddenly I was working more effectively and picking up new skills on the way. Try them out and see which ones work for you.

So that’s it — my top five tips for getting started. Nothing groundbreaking here, I know, but hopefully some basic insights into the world of social media management. Time to get back to learning… Thanks for reading!